


A Place Where I Belong

by GoldenTruth813



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Best Friends, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, HP: EWE, Healing, Hogwarts Eighth Year, M/M, Post war feels & healing, Titantic References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-24
Updated: 2018-04-24
Packaged: 2019-04-27 09:07:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14422122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldenTruth813/pseuds/GoldenTruth813
Summary: After the war Dean flounders to find his place but in the end it's not really about where he fits, but with whom.





	A Place Where I Belong

**Author's Note:**

  * For [frnklymrshnkly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/frnklymrshnkly/gifts).
  * Translation into Español available: [A Place Where I Belong [TRADUCCIÓN]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18293525) by [ClearlyNoClear](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClearlyNoClear/pseuds/ClearlyNoClear)



As Dean’s feet step onto Platform 9 ¾ for the first time since the war ended—boots stomping heavy as his heart—he expects to feel like he’s coming home. Instead it feels like going into battle all over again.

Broken spells and broken hearts fill his head as he thinks of all the ways they won—but more importantly, all the things they lost.

He hears Seamus shouting up and down the entire train looking for him but doesn’t have the nerve to open the door, not even for Seamus. Especially not for Seamus. He’d seen him over the Summer of course, but it’d been weeks and seeing him at home feels vastly different to seeing him on the train again. Seamus, who faced horrors with the Carrows and the war he still won’t speak of and somehow manages to always be smiling, his nose bunching up with the force of it and the dimples in his cheeks popping out. Seamus is always happy, and Dean...Dean can’t take that from him. Not when Seamus lost so much already.

So he casts the strongest Disillusionment and Notice-Me-Not Charms he knows and stays hidden in the loo for the entire trip.

  
  


***~*~*~***

  
  


“Then I told Harry, ‘ _ mate,’  _ I said to him, ‘Malfoy does too stare at you and always has.’ And would you believe he said he didn't! Can you believe him! Dean—Dean, are you listening?” Seamus asks, chucking a balled-up sock at his head.

Dean startles, forcing on a smile. “Yeah well, it’s Harry isn’t it?”

“Aye  _ Harry _ ,” Seamus agrees with a laugh, as if that explains everything. 

Seamus drops back onto his bed, folds his arms behind his head, and stretches his legs out. Dean can still remember the first night they’d shared a dorm, can still remember the shock he’d felt when Seamus had pulled back the curtains and simply said, “Oi, it’s bloody freezing, I’m sharing with you, mate.” 

It hadn’t been a question—though Dean would’ve said yes had it been—instead it’d been an assumption. Seamus had just assumed Dean wanted him around, assumed they would be friends, assumed they’d do everything together. It suited Dean just fine. He liked that Seamus fit himself into all the empty spaces in Dean’s life—spaces Dean hadn’t even known were empty. He’d liked that Seamus, as a half blood, could tell Dean everything he needed to know about the Wizarding World while he was also able to understand the things about being Muggle that made Dean feel like he didn’t quite fit at Hogwarts. He liked that Seamus seemed to just enjoy being around him, even when he didn’t think he was offering much. It was hard to room with someone like Harry Potter and not feel like you weren’t top snuff. Of course, Dean never begrudged Harry that, Harry was a good friend and so were Ron, when he wasn’t being a git, and Neville, when he wasn’t too absorbed in his own stuff. It’s just...there was always something going on in their year that made Dean feel as if he got lost or forgotten. Except with Seamus—Seamus, who knew all the best and worst things about everything and everyone, and still thought Dean was better than everyone else.

“Are you glad you came back?” Dean asks moments later, trying to fill the silence with Seamus again, guilt swirling through his stomach when Seamus jumps. After weeks apart, weeks back home with his parents, he’d almost forgotten the way Seamus could fall asleep anywhere or any time, even in the middle of a conversation.

“Course,” he mumbles sleepily, rubbing at his eyes. “Came back in my seventh year and that was a load of rubbish, wasn’t it? Why wouldn't I be happy to be back for an eighth, especially now that me and you get our own room. About fucking time.” 

Dean smiles, the first real smile he’s let himself have in months. Only Seamus would refer to the Carrows’ systematic torture and cruelty as ‘rubbish.’ Seamus, who’d been beaten beyond recognition last year, and still only dared to ask how Dean was, as if  _ Dean _ was the one who might be broken. Seamus, who was so loud he seemed to take up the entire room, and yet never wanted anything for himself. Seamus, who used humour to simultaneously make sure everyone knew he was around while also making sure no one took him seriously enough to matter. 

“What about you?” Seamus asks, rolling onto his side and leaning on his elbow. He is stretched out all the way and  takes up only three quarters of the bed. 

Dean mulls the answer over in his head, the words tasting wrong on his tongue. He doesn’t know how to give voice to his truths. He doesn’t want to be back home, but he isn’t sure he wants to be here either. Except when he looks up, Seamus  pulls a face at him, arms tucked under him and forehead scrunched. Dean can’t help it, he laughs. Seamus laughs too, even harder than Dean.

“I’m glad I came back,” Dean answers, minutes later as they lie together on the floor exerted from laugher, Seamus’s sandy hair tickling Dean’s nose as he wiggles, trying to get comfortable. In that moment, Dean knows it’s the truth.

Maybe, he thinks, already hearing Seamus’s breathing even into a slow and steady rhythm, he can keep taking things one moment at a time.

  
  


***~*~*~***

 

After the war, Dean started drawing in the middle of the night—the moon, the shadows on the wall, the things he saw when he closed his eyes. He couldn’t explain to anyone, not even himself, why he did it in secret. It was just that something about it felt like something he didn’t want to share with anyone anymore. Didn’t or couldn't. He wasn’t sure which. Wasn’t sure he cared either. 

He’s been back at school for three weeks the moment Dean first realises he doesn’t feel like he fits anywhere. He doesn’t fit in the Muggle world, where no one knows the horrors he’s seen, or the pain he still sometimes feels like he’s running from. And yet, he isn’t entirely sure he fits in the Wizarding World anymore, either. 

Dean feels selfish, he knows he isn’t the only one hurting, he knows everyone else has their trauma and pain. He sees the way Harry sneaks out when he thinks no one is watching, the way Malfoy eyes the unlit fireplaces during Charms and Transfiguration, and the way Ron and Hermione always sleep together not because they want to sleep  _ together  _ but because they can’t sleep  _ alone _ . But all the same, there is always a part of Dean’s grief that feels unimaginable to other people. He doesn’t know why. It isn’t like his friends haven’t faced the same or worse. It makes him feel guilty and selfish so he hides away his pain and he hides away his art and he hides away all the things that make him feel like himself, to make sure no one can take them from him again.

  
  
  


***~*~*~***

  
  


“What’s this?” Dean asks, taking the small package from Seamus.

Seamus shrugs, nudging his shoulder into Dean conspiratorially with a wink before turning around to walk backwards, allowing him to watch Dean’s face as they walk towards the lake. “Did I tell you my mum’s agreed to let me get my own flat when we leave school?”

“Shay, we’ve only been back two months and you’re already thinking about leaving?”

Seamus grins. “ _ Oi _ —it’s never too early to know what you want. And what I want is some freedom!” Seamus throws his arms out and his head back, letting out a loud whoop as he starts running in circles. “Don’t you ever just want to scream?”

Dean chews on his bottom lip, peeling back the plain brown paper on the package—the exact same one that had landed in Seamus’s porridge that morning. It’s not until the paper is crumbled in his left hand does Dean realise that Seamus has stopped yelling, stopped running, is standing just inches from him. 

“You ran out, right?” Seamus says almost hesitantly and Dean can’t recall ever hearing Seamus speak with such a soft lilt to his voice. Seamus’s hands reach out towards Dean as he pries the small case from him and opens it to reveal an array of brightly coloured charcoal pencils—Dean’s favourite, the kind you can only buy in Muggle shops. 

“How did you know?” Dean asks, running his fingertips across them, his heart rate increasing. He hadn’t told Seamus. Hadn’t told anyone. 

“Your fingers,” Seamus says, and his voice still has this quality that makes Dean want to stop and draw him right there—something intangible and fragile—Dean’s never seen it before. Or if it was there before, maybe he wasn’t looking hard enough. “Your fingers would have charcoal on them when you woke up.”

Unconsciously Dean looks down at his hands, but Seamus is quicker, pocketing the charcoal pencils and placing Dean’s hand in his own. Dean’s hand is bigger than Seamus’s, stronger and longer, and yet something about the way it feels to have Seamus cradling his hand like that makes him feel very small. 

“Right here,” Seamus says, dragging his pointer finger across the palm of Dean’s hand, along the fold of his thumb and over and up his pointer finger. “You’d have it smudged all over here. Then you’d wash it off when you woke up. But this week you didn’t have it there anymore so I thought maybe—” He drops Dean’s hand as if just realising he’s still holding it. “Just thought you might need more.”

Seamus reaches into his pocket and pulls them out, holding them towards Dean, but they fall to the grass when Dean envelops Seamus in a hug, pressing his face into Seamus hair and inhaling deeply—breathing in the scent of the sun and Seamus’s shampoo, breathing in the scent of hope.

Dean thinks of all the people who’ve asked him why he doesn’t draw since he returned to school, of all the people who’ve asked him what happened and how he’s changed. For a brief moment, Dean had thought maybe Seamus didn’t care, but it occurs to him now Seamus cares a lot. A whole lot. And where other people were just asking, Seamus was  _ looking _ .

  
  
  


***~*~*~***

  
  


The first time Dean brings his art stuff out is the night of Halloween. 

The eighth years have been given permission to have a small party so long as they keep it in the new joint common room they all share. It doesn’t take long for Dean to need a reprieve from the noise and drunken shenanigans, though, and he retreats to his and Seamus’s room pretty early on. He lies in bed staring at the ceiling wishing he could draw, when it occurs to him the only person stopping him is, well,  _ him _ .

So Dean pulls out his sketchbook, spreads the charcoal pencils out along the top of his perfectly made bed and begins to draw. 

He thinks about the way Seamus looked at eleven the time he’d singed his eyebrow off, or the way he’d looked at thirteen boasting he could take on Sirius Black. He thinks of Seamus at fifteen, the moment he’d told Harry he didn't believe him, and then months later about the way Seamus had been able to admit he was wrong. He thinks about Seamus’s face the last time he’d seen him before he’d gone on the run during the war, smiling and laughing because they hadn’t known it’d be the last time. He thinks of Seamus’s face during the battle, bloodied and bruised and still trying to catch Dean’s eyes in an encouraging smile. 

Mostly though, mostly he thinks about Seamus tonight, huddled in the corner with Ron and Harry, laughing loudly as they shared a bottle of Firewhiskey. He’d been wearing Dean’s favourite West Ham hoodie (it fell to mid thigh and the sleeves were too long), but fuck did he look proud wearing it. He hadn’t asked, just walked past Dean, grabbed it from his trunk, and put it on. It’s hard for Dean to put into words the way it makes him feel, so instead he picks up one of the pencils and draws the way it makes him feel. He draws freckles like the stars in the sky he’d count at night when he was on the run, wondering if he’d see Seamus again, he draws a smile so bright not even a hex or a fist could fight it into submission. He thinks of hazel eyes and freckled skin, of a warm laugh and a warmer heart.

When it’s done Dean can’t help but smile, pleased with the result. It’s as if Seamus were standing right in front of him—well, if Seamus ever stood still long enough for someone to draw him—every single freckle, every bit of bed head that Seamus never bothers to brush, down to the two lopsided dimples embedded in his cheeks when he smiles.

Dean draws to give voice to the feeling he can’t say, and looking down at the picture of Seamus clutched in his hand, Dean finds himself utterly certain he is in love with him.

  
  


***~*~*~***

 

Dean doesn’t show Seamus the picture he drew. But he does start drawing around him. Not in the common room, not yet. But in the safety of their dorm, when Seamus has a sugar quill between his lips as he reads his Charms essay out loud to himself, Dean draws.

He doesn’t draw Seamus again, not exactly. He draws the sugar quills he eats and the logo on his favourite Irish National Team jumper. He draws the practice Snitch that Seamus likes to play with when he thinks no one is watching him and he draws the small hillside, the spot where Seamus had given him the pencils—where he’d given him hope.

“Do you ever think about...about drawing me?” Seamus asks one day in late January. It’s not even particularly cold and there’s the usual fire burning in their room, but even still Seamus has on two pairs of socks, his favourite jumper  _ and  _ Dean’s West Ham hoodie, which he honestly wears more often than Dean lately. 

Dean opens and shuts his mouth a few times, unsure how to answer. He thinks of the drawing of Seamus hidden in his bedside drawer, of the fact that it’s so perfectly Seamus Dean thought he’d never wanted to draw him again, afraid he’d never be able to capture him as well.

Seamus looks unsure all of a sudden as he drops down on the end of Dean’s bed, sliding his feet under Dean’s outstretched legs. “S’okay, I know it’s hard to draw this much beauty. It’s a bit like Rose and Jack isn’t it.”

Dean snorts, remembering the summer night he’d convinced Seamus to watch Titanic just before they’d returned this year. He’d spent the next two weeks while he was at Dean’s house whining about why the hell Rose didn’t just scoot the fuck over and make some space. He’d also spent those two weeks teasing Dean mercilessly every time he got out of the shower by dramatically throwing himself on Dean’s bed and asking if he wanted to draw him. The last time Dean had laughed and declined the offer had been the last time Seamus had asked to be drawn. It only occurs to Dean now that perhaps Seamus hadn’t been entirely joking before.

“Well no, it’s not quite like that. For one, you would never let me drown in the ocean.”

Seamus’s smile widens as he leans forward. “Aha, so I am Rose and you’re Jack! I knew it!”

Dean feels his lips twitching of their own accord. Everything is better with Seamus—happier, easier, somehow just more of everything he always thought life was supposed to be like after the war. 

“Well I can draw, obviously.” Dean knows where this is going, thinks he should’ve always known where this was going.

“I noticed you didn’t deny wanting to draw me or being madly in love with me, though.”   Despite the playful tone there's something searching in Seamus eyes, a question Dean wants terribly to answer. 

“Well I mean, it's hard to deny the truth.”

Seamus’s smile falters in surprise and before Dean can say anything else, Seamus has crawled into his lap and knocked him over, hands on his chest as he laughs wildly. “This isn't like the time you said you liked Ireland to win the World Cup, but you were only saying that because it's what you thought I wanted to hear, right?” 

“No, Shay, it's not like that at all.”

Seamus huffs out a breath, his hands moving from Dean’s chest to his face, touching him as though he might spook him away. Dean's never seen Seamus be this gentle with anyone before and it does something to him, to know he's the one thing Seamus wants enough to be scared of losing. So he leans forward, hands tangling in Seamus’s hair as he draws him closer, bringing their lips together. Seamus’s lips are chapped and he tastes like rum and chocolate cake. 

“Dean, Dean—” Seamus gasps, pulling out of the kiss and looking serious. “Are you still going to want to draw me when I'm eighty and covered in wrinkles?!” He looks serious enough that something in Dean snaps and he howls with laughter, dragging Seamus atop him and burying his face in his neck. 

Seamus’s chest heaves and Dean can feel him smiling against the top of his head. “I like when you laugh,” he whispers. 

Dean kisses the cluster of freckles below Seamus’s ear. “You make me laugh.”

“I guess,” Seamus begins, hands fisting in the worn cotton of Dean's flannel shirt. “I guess we better stick together then. Forever. Just in case.”

“Yeah, guess we better,” Dean agrees, marveling that he'd spent so long wondering if he fit in the Muggle world or the Wizarding  world. He’d overlooked that it wasn’t about where he belonged, but who he belonged with. 

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [Tumblr](http://goldentruth813.tumblr.com/) <3


End file.
